MAGNUS

The petascale supercomputer Magnus, from the Latin for ‘Great’, is a latest-generation Cray XC40 system hosting high-end supercomputing projects across the entire range of scientific fields supported by iVEC.

Local storage (also known as the scratch file system) is provided by a three-cabinet Cray Sonexion 1600 Lustre appliance, with a usable capacity of 3PB and a sustained read/write performance of 70 GB/sec.

In the November 2014 Top500 list, Magnus debuted at #41, achieving 1,097 TeraFLOPS (1 PetaFLOP+). At the time of writing, this makes Magnus the most advanced scientific supercomputer in the Southern Hemisphere.

Internode communications are more than 9,300-times faster than the NBN.

Magnus is more than three orders of magnitude more powerful than iVEC’s first terascale supercomputer, named Cognac, which began production in 2005.

Approximately 4km of optical and copper cables link Magnus’s processors together, in a Dragonfly topology, for capability-scale computations.

The cabinet artwork on Magnus, ‘SKA Satellites on the Murchison’ by Margaret Whitehurst, is an homage to the Centre’s close connection to the north-west of Western Australia. It has been designed to reflect ‘the ground below’, in reference to geoscience, one of the areas of science iVEC supports most closely. For more information on the artwork, please click here.